Word: fante
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Egypt's Tutankhamen collected walking sticks; Hermann Wilhelm Göring collects stag antlers. You can never tell what a collector is going to collect or why. A woman in Richmond avidly collects toy elephants- for the excellent reason that her name is Mrs. L. E. Fant. The ferocious Ferrante, King of Naples, was fond of collecting his political enemies, whom he had executed, stuffed and mounted, and kept tastefully arrayed in a special room in his palace...
...priceless antiques. The War between the States has just ended. A Yankee brute assaults America's sister, Palestine. America is forced to kill him with a two-foot corn knife. America flees other lady-chasing Yankees along a row of fruit trees. Later she flees lady-killing Fant Annable down a row of tobacco plants. Still later (because of the murdered rapist and to be near Fant) she flees to relatives in Mason County...
...Fant calls her "sorrel top" but tells her frankly that he is "not the marrying kind." Nevertheless, when she wins a horse race for him, he can't resist. In mid-honeymoon in New Orleans, America learns the truth about him: Fant is a gambler and a dastard. For a while she supports him by selling off her trousseau to pleasure women (Fant is fit to die laughing). But Fant kills a fellow gambler, then dives off a sternwheeler. America returns to a Kentucky tobacco farm, gets to work supporting herself, surrounded by some of the richest Scottish, Irish...
...then Fant turns up, a love-hungry fugitive, among the tobacco leaves. There are trysts like "that moonless July night, when Fant's whistle had wooed her out to the walnut grove." Two daughters are the result of these whistles. In their wake comes ostracism. For nobody on earth must know that hunted murderer Fant is still alive...
Later on, Fant's death restores America's good name. She still has her moments. She powders the webs of 100,000 Mississippi Bayou spiders with gold and silver dust for a treacherous daughter's highfalutin wedding. But the latter part of Drivin' Woman is an account of the bracing fight of the small tobacco farmers against the Trust. Descriptions of raising, grading, priming and selling tobacco result in a fragment of U.S. social-and-economic history so simple and sound that not even Mrs. Chevalier's panchromatic prose can make it much less...